International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Lara Sels
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 
[e-mail]
The
 Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem 
in Greek and Slavonic
This paper seeks to present the rich Slavonic tradition of the pseudo-Athanasian erotapocritic 
collection 
Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem
(
CPG
2257) in the light of the tradition of its Greek 
source text. It will be argued that the textual history of the Slavonic 
Quaestiones
is marked by various 
moments of contact with the Greek tradition and by repeated efforts to bring the Slavonic in line 
with different Greek versions. Attention will be drawn to the way in which the compound nature 
of this collection – made up of a variable number of individual questions-and-answers – affects the 
process of transmission.
The Slavonic tradition seems to have started with (a) translation(s) of a limited number of 
questions (some of which also found integrated in new contexts, as in the case of the famous 
Izbornik
of 1076). From the 13
th
/14
th 
century on, a renewed comparison with Greek copies apparently led to 
retranslations and expansions of the early kernel, resulting in ever fuller collections of 
Quaestiones
. 
The high degree of conflation within the Slavonic tradition (as, e.g., in the version found in 
Codex 
Pragensis slav.
IX.F.15) complicates the identification of the stages through which the textual material 
has passed. However, a comparison with the Greek tradition as a whole can help disentangle the knots 
of conflation by identifying moments of contact with the Greek as anchor points for the isolation of 
the different textual layers within the tradition of the Slavonic 
Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem
.
Ida Toth
University of Oxford, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies,
Oxford, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher: 
Questions and Answers on Kingship, Morality and Fate
The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher reached the easternmost Byzantine frontier in a 
translation from Syriac during the last decades of the eleventh century. This translation marked the 
starting point of a tradition that carried on for a considerable time, producing a series of gradual 
modifications, whose linguistic ranges spanned from the middle-register Byzantine
 koinē
to several 
more liberal renditions of the story into modern Greek. All of these were reasonably popular: 
they survive in some twenty-five manuscripts dating to the time between the fourteenth and the 
seventeenth centuries.
It is generally assumed that 
the two medieval Greek versions represent two successive stages 
in the evolution of this work from a faithful rendition of a piece of eastern literature into a more 

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idiomatic narrative, more comfortably situated within the range of the written norms of the period.
This communication focuses on the section of Questions and Answers in the Book of Syntipas (
pp. 
122, l. 1 – 129, l. 13) 
in order to 
examine the mutual relationship and discrepancies between the two 
extant Greek versions, and to reassess our understanding of the practices of rewriting involved in 
the production of this popular piece of fictional literature.